Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead. Sidney Lumet. 2007.

How odd. I’ve seen the first three minutes of this before, according to Emacs. But… I bailed?

So this is Sydney Lumet, they guy who did a gazillion worthy movies in the 70s. Like Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, The Verdict, Equus… I haven’t seen a movie of his since Deathtrap in 1982, so I don’t know whether this movie (his final) is an anomaly for him or not.

Going by my extremely limited knowledge of him, if I were nasty I’d say that he’d seen Pulp Fiction and too much New Era Of Quality TV and then decided to make something m. o. d. e. r. n.

It has it all: Small-time crooks; hyperviolence; a messed-up timeline; oh-so-ironic outcomes; etc.

In short: It’s pretty awful.

It features two actors I know a lot of people like: Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke. I don’t particularly like either of them. At least Marisa Tomei and Albert Finney is in here to class things up.

I’m guessing this was a successful strategy, because:

The critical consensus reads: “A tense and effective thriller, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead marks a triumphant return to form for director Sidney Lumet.

People love this kind of thing! I mean, The Sopranos was wildly successful and it as all about listening to some moron nattering on about whatever, and that was endlessly fascinating because bad boys are so interesting. Showing a criminal not being a monster 100% of the is just so deep!

The cinematography’s pretty awful. It looks like a digital video shoot, and those didn’t start getting good until a few years after this was shot.

It’s an ugly, boring movie.

The Birds. Alfred Hitchcock. 1963.

What! It’s in colour! I’ve seen this before, of course, and in my mind’s eye it’s in black and white!

I realise now that I don’t remember anything about this movie. I just vaguely remember Tippi Hedren being attacked by some… crows? Sitting on some telephone wires? Oh. I’m not the only one…

ANYWAY.

What’s so striking about this movie is that there’s really no hint at the start of the movie of what even the genre is, or even where the plot is going in a general sense. It’s so weird!

Until the first gull attack, it’s amusing and puzzling, but from there on it’s absolutely riveting. The creeping horror intensifying slowly, slowly…

One bit that just doesn’t work is all the womenfolk reacting in sheer passive horror at the proceedings while The Man goes around shuttering all the windows. And Hitchcock has a real problem with the main horror concept here: There’s no way these birds can harm anybody without somebody willingly walking into a room full of the birbs and then shutting the door behind them, so, of course, that’s what happens.

Still, there’s so much powerful imagery in here.

And, of course, Hitchcock was abusing Tippi Hedren throughout the making of this movie, because she refused to have sex with him. Some of the bird attack scenes were horrifying for her, too.

Kiss Me, Stupid. Billy Wilder. 1964.

I watched a Billy Wilder movie yesterday, so I thought I might as well watch the final movie in the DVD box set I bought at least a decade ago. Making room on the to-be-watched shelf!

I like Billy Wilder, but he’s not really a director that I find… er… interesting? He makes dependably funny movies: Well-made, uncomplicated, supremely Hollywood from cinematography to how the actors deliver their lines.

For a while, it seemed like any professional director from this era got a reappraisal as an auteur (Emeric Pressburger, Douglas Sirk etc), but I don’t think that’s happened with Wilder? Perhaps it has but I just missed it?

ANYWAY.

This starts off quite amusingly with Dean Martin on stage, and then we move to a little town in the boondocks where Ray Walston lives a life of insane jealousy and hopes of becoming a famous composer. He fantastic in the role, but the role is perhaps more unpleasant than intended.

I feel like this should have been more engaging than it is. The individual scenes are satisfyingly kooky but the pacing seems too slow. If this had been a movie from the 40s, it’d have been half an hour shorter and a lot snappier. It feels like Wilder takes too much time setting things up, so in the end the entire movie is mostly moving the pieces into position (at the one hour mark).

The last hour has some LOL out loud bits and works much better. Except some particularly creepy bits.